I’ve often written about dealing with inner resistance, and how to move past it to improve your life. Most of the time, I’ve outlined actions that you can take to outflank or outsmart the inner resistance. Pamm of My Secret Spiritual Dance wrote an article regarding her commitment to continue with her breathwork and meditation, and how that has brought her face-to-face with a “wall” she ran into a while back. While that wall of resistance turned her away in the past, she has gained enough strength to confront it and this time (hooray!) she was able to move past it.
Hitting the wall.
Quite often, when you hit that wall of inner resistance, you don’t even realize it. It takes a lot of self-awareness to realize what’s going on when it happens. Most of us simply run into something that is just a touch too difficult and then we spontaneously lose interest. Oh, sure we can do it, we just never seem to actually get around to it. We manifest a busy schedule and other priorities, and tell ourselves that it’s just too bad that we can’t do that thing like we wanted to.
When you have sufficient awareness to realize what’s going on, that automatically means that it becomes a conscious decision. That still doesn’t guarantee you have the strength to continue, but it does provide greater perspective. If you know where your limits are, you can plan to move past them.
Moving beyond the brick wall.
There are three basic methods that I have seen for trying to move past a “wall”:
- Brute force. Rather obvious, and lacking in subtlety. You muster all the power you can and forge ahead. Risky at best, but can be worth a try. The obvious problem with this method is that you need a lot of power to force your way through. Even if you are successful, breaking through can be painful, almost as if you do feel like it’s raining bricks on you.
- Brick-by-brick. Slowly, and with great care, you erode your resistance by making small, un-threatening moves. This has the advantage of subtlety. Never a direct confrontation with the wall. Instead you just remove one brick at a time until eventually there is no wall. The weakness of this particular method is that it is difficult to implement, especially at first. It can try the patience, trying to bring down a wall one brick at a time. The temptation arises to try to do more than the method calls for. You wind up trying to do to much and self-destruct your efforts.
- Relax and let go. As Pamm demonstrated, much can be accomplished by relaxing and letting the wall be. Remember that the “wall” is just a clumsy defense mechanism that you created. The resistance comes from within, so it can be dismissed from within. If you are tired of trying to butt heads with a brick wall, or don’t think that you can wear it down in the traditional method, this might be the method for you. One thing to note with this method is that in order for it to be most effective, you have to actually let go, as Pamm is.
A few problems with letting go.
A quick word here: Letting go is not the same thing as “losing”. You can let go of your job and wind up more effective because of it simply because you no longer have attachments that get in your way. The same can be said for relationships, especially romantic love: If you are hanging onto the person or relationship with a death grip, that’s exactly what will happen. If you let go and be the person that your partner fell in love with, you may well find that your relationship is improved. Hm. Not so quick a word after all. But I digress.
If you read her account (and her next post) you can see that it isn’t easy. When you truly let go it can feel like you’re stepping off a cliff. Letting go also takes a huge amount of inner strength. Perhaps even more than the brute force method. Yet, the strength required is different slightly, as the strength needed to let go is faith in yourself and/or in your Higher Power.
Furthermore, in order to be most effective, you can’t decide of one thing to let go of and keep hanging on to others. In order to let go you have to truly let go and fly. This itself can be downright scary for most people. I myself have a bit of inner resistance to even using this method. Not having the outright power to tackle that head on, I’ve been wearing it down. It has decreased massively in the last couple of years, and my work is starting to seriously pay off. I am everyday re-learning how liberating and empowering letting go can really be.
Thinking of giving up?
If you have raised your awareness enough so you know inner resistance when you see it, then you don’t need me to tell you it will still be there when you come back. But the beauty of it is that as you gain in strength, as you learn, and as you relax into your true self, the resistance will weaken until you can turn it into an ally.
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